Hobby Update: Varangian Foot Guard

Huzzah! I got some more hobbying in recently and can now cross off a long-held hobby goal for the Regnum Aeternum. I have a nice horde of smashy Foot Guard now. 

The full horde. It is a little hard to photograph the whole thing. 

Lacking appropriate Byzantine minis when I started the army in earnest in 2016, I subbed in Romans from Warlord Games, but my Kingdoms of Men collection has drawn a lot of inspiration from the Byzantines. One of their iconic units was the Varangian Guard, so it's been a goal of mine to hobby one up for some time, though sourcing minis has proved difficult over the years. This has turned into a $100 unit I am sorry to say, going against a lot of my usual, frugal hobbying habits.

One-half of the unit.

Back in 2020, as the pandemic kicked off, I backed a kickstarter by Fireforge Games for their Byzantine range, which is now widely available commercially. While the pledge was only around $100, I probably still should not have done this - I have yet to use a single sprue, though I have purchased and used some of their Auxiliaries separately, for the redone Militia. In the kickstarter, I picked up some Varangian Guard, which happened to be resin. 

And a close-up of the other half. 

I then bought a box of Fireforge's plastic medieval Russian Infantry thinking I would mix and match the plastic and the resin minis. However, I did not do my homework. I had more resin minis than I thought, and the plastic kit does that "we'll give you two of each weapon type" so they cannot all be wielding two-handers like I wanted. To add insult to injury, the resin minis are head-and-shoulders taller than the plastic, which was disappointing. Since this was coming from the same manufacturer, I just assumed they would match up better. In the end, I was foolish, and decided that I wanted to work with plastic. Each box got me 10 two-handers, so I picked up three boxes and an extra sprue to build this full unit. No clue what I am going to do with the other 3/5ths of the boxes. Or the original resin minis for that matter. This has been a wildly unsound hobbying endeavor for me!

Backing the Kickstarter was probably an error. And buying so many boxes of Russian Infantry was also a bad move. I have another... basically full human army sitting around now. I should be a bit smarter and am unfortunately getting a growing pile of shame going in my closet. Thankfully, all my shame still fits into one storage box! Though we won't discuss the storage box of sorted bits, nor the box of stuff in-process... 

The minis were a little harder to hobby up that I had anticipated. All the heads are swiveling, looking off to the left of the mini. I did not realize this until most of the minis were otherwise assembled - I was putting the heads on last. So a few are looking in weird directions or holding the axe head with an awkward angle, but as a group they look fine. Additionally, the stand for the minis is thick. Rather than try to cut around it, i opted to just add more pebbles to the base over the hobby paste. The stands are still noticeable, but this all looks well enough for wargaming. 

All-in-all I am quite happy that the unit is done, and am pleased with it already. I have rather liked the Foot Guard on the table so far. Both the smashy and Def5 versions have been great and reliable as regiments, but I think I'll like having access to the smashy horde as I reconsider my Kingdoms of Men builds. I am convinced now that the army basically does need hordes to work optimally, and look forward to exploring more!